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Carl Zimmer: Hello, Biologic Institute. If I make a strong claim about science in an online forum, and someone asks me for evidence for that claim, I do not say, “Well, you’ll just have to read my book.” I provide the evidence–I point to the peer-reviewed research on which I based my statement. But, hey, I’d be perfectly satisfied if you pointed me to a scientific paper that presents calculations showing that the chromosome fusion could not have happened six million years ago. I can go find it for myself–if such a paper actually exists.

Well, that was the last I heard from the Biologic Institute. They still haven’t piped back up on their own thread. However, I did hear from someone who had read the book, Paul MacBride. (
He even reviewed it here
.) Here’s the comment he left on Facebook:

Carl, I can tell you the answer to your question, as I have read the book. Luskin provides no evidence for this. Well, more correctly, he quotes a question from this paper http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12421751 “If the fusion occurred within the telomeric repeat arrays less than ∼6 Mya, why are the arrays at the fusion site so degenerate?” but not their three suggested answers. Luskin asserts that if a chromosomal fusion occurred it should have been a neat and tidy joining of the two chromosomes in question, anything else is a Problem For Evolution. Dave Wisker addressed this succintly in a comment at Panda’s Thumb http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2012/07/paul-mcbrides-r.html#comment-288503

I read the 2002 paper long ago, but MacBride’s link led me to reread it. I also noticed that it was cited by a number of more recent papers, including Eichler’s new one. It just goes to show how you can end up learning something new in the most unexpected places.

UPDATE:
This post inspired Respondable, a new Boomerang feature! Respondable uses AI to evaluate the effectiveness of your emails (and help you increase the chance of a response) in real-time as you write. Try it today – the basic version is free!

Over the past year, our customers asked Boomerang to remind them if they didn’t get a response to over 40 million emails. Writing emails that get responses is an incredibly valuable skill – and what makes an email likely to get a response is hard to determine.

There’s a lot of advice about how to write a good email on the web, from general writing advice to full sets of pre-written email templates. But almost none of that advice shows the data behind it (usually because there isn’t any), and a lot of it is contradictory.

The results were so interesting that we decided to share them here as well.

If you find this information helps you send better emails, we’d appreciate it if you give Boomerang a try in return. You can send emails at optimal times and get notified if your message doesn’t receive a response, so you remember to follow up. You can also include a read receipt, so you know if your message got lost in the pile. Boomerang comes with a Basic plan that lets you use it several times a month completely free.

Thanks in advance for giving it a try! Now, without further ado, here’s the roundup of what really matters when you’re sending an email!

Our most surprising finding was that the reading grade level of your emails has a dramatic impact on response rates.
Emails written at a 3rd grade reading level were optimal.
They provided a whopping 36% lift over emails written at a college reading level and a 17% higher response rate than emails written even at a high school reading level. As someone who’s been described as a “pedantic rambler,” this one hits me right in the fingers. But rather than decry the state of English language education, I’ll just try to roll with it and
streamline my lexicon
simplify my verbiage
use shorter words in shorter sentences.